If you’ve walked along the boulevard des Philosophes recently, you may have paused in front of number 20, wondering about the banner stretched across the facade: "Equality is built. Together. La Collective will open its doors in 2027— a space bringing together seven women's associations, a café, a library, housing, childcare, and cultural life under one roof. One of the women behind it, Laurence Levrat-Pictet, has spent a lifetime making things like this happen. I went to find out how.

Writer, interviewer, collector of conversations. Alain Elkann has sat across from presidents, cardinals, artists, and Nobel Prize winners — thousands of conversations spanning decades — and never once posed a question he wasn't willing to abandon. I met him at his home in Geneva to talk a bit about everything: the craft of the interview, the future of books, why common sense might be the most underrated virtue of our time, and the advice that has stayed with him since childhood.

Geneva gave the world the Red Cross, the United Nations, and — as it turns out — the modern comic strip. It's a part of the city's identity that often gets overlooked, but from a 19th-century teacher sketching picture stories by the lake to a new comics museum opening in the works, Geneva's relationship with the ninth art is deeper and more alive than most people realize.